It seems that with spring just around the corner, 360-degree evaluations are in the air!

A recent article "Services spend management: Find your inner salesperson" By David Hannon -- Purchasing, 2/12/2009, has this excellent advice from Dean Edwards, CPO at one of the US's largest health providers, Kaiser Permanente.

To get a clearer picture of the service provider's performance, Edwards recommends doing 360 evaluations where procurement serves as the middleman, getting the opinions of both the internal stakeholders and the services providers. Why? "Well in our separate surveys and interviews, we'd hear gripes and complaints from each side but when we all got in the room together it was a gigantic lovefest," he laughs. "So by using surveys and the 360 evaluations we were able to call out the issues at hand and solve them rather than let them fester. That helped drive performance and the relationships."

Dean's insight into the power of collecting feedback prior to meeting is on the money. It is vital to have the issues raised in a formal process. If they are not, often in a face-to-face environment people are reticent to bring them up, for fear they may add friction to the relationship. It is also vital to give the supplier/agency a voice in the room - and 360-feedback provides this.

We have a new whitepaper specifically on 360-evaluations which will be released next month. It will explore not only the upside, but also how to avoid some of the potential pitfalls. Please contact us on blog@decideware.com if you would like a copy when it is released.

I have also included a list below from the same article, provided by Robin Jackson (Chairman of ADR International) definitely one of the the leading global purchasing consulting firms. I urge that these categories of spend should be strong candidates for performing 360-degree evaluations with your organization.

The seven most difficult services spend areas to manage

• IT
• Consulting
• Legal
• Marketing
• Utilities
• Travel
• Fleet

Author: Richard Benyon (Decideware)